How do you adjust your targeting strategy to maximize effectiveness?

With advancements in AI on most digital platforms, “targeting” becomes less relevant. Gone are the days where you need 15 ad sets targeting a slightly different persona. In this age, it’s more important to define targeting through the creatives, having multiple messaging for diff audience personas. Platform targeting becomes less important, a broad interest is often sufficient. Creative is the new targeting.

In my opinion, it is absolutely necessary to define a baseline from your existing approach. If you want to try out a new approach, always test it out against the existing approach to make sure that the new approach gives tangible gains over the existing approach. Re-inventing the wheel for the sake of reinvention can be dangerous at times.

Keeping in mind that the definition of the target of a start-up with that of medium and large companies are two very different worlds, I apply a different approach to each case, but I always maintain these common denominators: - I identify the targets that I consider will NOT be interested in my clients' products and/or services. - I identify potential consumer groups and establish a marketing and sales strategy for each of them. - I measure the impact of these strategies through data analysis. - With these results, I re-allocate efforts and budget, prioritizing the groups with the highest potential.

Targeting is absolutely the most important criteria to think of. To decide what kind of creatives, title or offer, we need to define who do we want to target first or we call customer profiling. Most ppl know very well in demographic of their customer, but most of them lack of info of psychographic and behaviour segmentation. Corporate or sme who has more budget to run a testing. But how about small sme, they don't have much budget to do long run testing. By knowing your targeting well, you will save lot time and effort of doing AB testing. Eg, property. We have two segmentations, investor and home buyer. To further segmentize investor, amateur investor, seasonal investor, foreigner investor. All three show diff behavior.

These analytics tools should be used to identify which marketing channels are performing best and what type of content is driving that performance. Identifying which type of topics, products, post formats etc... perform best can also help you identify why a different channel is underperforming. For example, if long form thought leadership articles on your website are generating the most conversions through organic SEO but your paid social media ads are underperforming. Perhaps adjusting your social media strategy from short form conversational content to long form expert perspective articles can help.

To refine your targeting strategy, firstly outline clear, achievable objectives in line with overarching business goals like boosting sales or enhancing customer loyalty. Next, establish the criteria guiding targeting decisions: consider factors like target segment size, growth potential, accessibility, and alignment with your brand. These benchmarks aid in prioritizing and selecting the most fitting segments for your endeavors.

Make a strong start on your journey to improvement by clearly defining your objectives and the criteria that will be used to measure success. Consider the company's goals and objectives. How closely do your campaigns align with the company's overall vision? How specifically do your campaigns complement or contrast with the message of the company's website? Before you launch visitors on pinball ride whizzing across your site, there should be a defined path and a destination. Determine who and what they will encounter as they travel to the goal page. Will they recognize when they have reached the intended objective? More importantly, how will you and your team recognize when visitors complete the objectives?

The overarching marketing strategy should be broken down into actionable items which can down the line become campaign goals. For example: if the overall marketing strategy is to increase stickiness of the user, it can be broken down into actionable items like: - Find out user attributes which increase user stickiness based on the user data you have - Once you have these attributes, segment your users based on these attributes and run campaigns to target users who are low on the scale of those attributes. - Each campaign then has a goal pertaining to a specific attribute

I always highlight to have a successful campaign, only 5 things to look into it. Customer profiling, objective, measurement, creatives and chosen platform. Ppl will always mix up with awareness, engagement and sales. Eg, a boss said, I want to ensure everyone can see my ads. This is awareness objective. But at the end of the day, boss expect big chuck of sales coming in. The objective and expectation mismatch. Boss forget about the what happen in middle funnel where ppl will start to ask more questions before they buy. If the campaign is not good, jus relook back the 5 elements, sure will find what is the reason.

Of course, within the marketing and sales strategies that I generate with my clients, I include online advertising actions, but in recent years I have been focusing on being more organic with actions. By doing this, I am able to better train the people who execute them, who better understand the entire process, and become owners of the implementation of the strategies, over time. The definition of the company's DNA, and the objectives that emerge from here, are fundamental to setting realistic Marketing and Commercial objectives that are in line with the company's purpose. I bet on the curated and personalized strategies, and less on the massive. This gives greater control, security and certainty, and allows to better measure the impact.

One more thing to keep in mind is the marketing communication channel attribution. You do not want to send emails to customers who are app first.

I believe marketing and sales is the same entity. To draft a better markeitng plans, talk to the frontliner which is sales persons. If the biz is purely digital based, then the metric of the campaign of ab testing and comments from post will give a better pictures. Psychographic and behavioral of customera are keep changing nowadays. So we have to really understand the customer buying pattern to increase the success rate of the campaign.

While targeting remains important, it's worth noting that the approach to targeting has evolved. Marketers are now using more sophisticated techniques, including machine learning and AI, to enhance targeting accuracy and effectiveness. Additionally, consumers are becoming more discerning, and they expect brands to provide value and relevance in their interactions.

These are the main factors that determine my targeting strategies: - Age: always important to identify group age necessities and expectations. - Interests: Social Media platforms allow us to identify people´s interest in a more efficient way than years behind. - Channel: there are many online platforms, and it is important to identify the proportion usage of different group ages. After you identify this, you generate tailor-made communications to each group. - Location: depending on the objetives of your strategy, you differ your communication among different cities / countries.

It's important to truly understand how A/B testing is supposed to work -- I see so many organizations using sample sizes that are too small, or testing windows that are too small for statistical significance. Make sure you read up on A/B testing best practices and then apply those fundamentals to your own A/B testing.

One of the cornerstones of marketing strategy should be constant experimentation based on data insights gleamed from each run of the campaign. If you can set a regular cadence for experimentation, it would help you evolve your overall campaign strategy to achieve your business goals.

Ab testing is the way to optimize the campaign. And it's continuously. As digital platform change rapidly. What works in past 6 mths may be work in next 6 mths. So, we might need to be kept on checking on the metrics, feedback from customer under comment too. Marketing will give the direct feedback through the number to us.

In trying to optimize all variables at once. This means first testing one variable—say, keywords—and once you've optimized that, moving on to the next variable like audiences or channels. This approach allows for more precise insights into what specifically is affecting performance, making it easier to fine-tune your strategy. For example, you might start by split testing different keywords for a PPC campaign. Once you've identified the most effective keywords, you could then move on to testing different audience segments. This sequential approach minimizes the variables in play at any given time, making your tests more reliable and easier to interpret.

A tip that's particularly effective in this stage is to employ "sequential testing" rather than trying to optimize all variables at once. This means first testing one variable—say, keywords—and once you've optimized that, moving on to the next variable like audiences or channels. This approach allows for more precise insights into what specifically is affecting performance, making it easier to fine-tune your strategy. For example, you might start by split testing different keywords for a PPC campaign. Once you've identified the most effective keywords, you could test different audience segments. This sequential approach minimizes the variables in play at any given time, making your tests more reliable and easier to interpret.

My experience from years ago was based on test and learn approaches using the correct samples sizes and appropriate randomized selections of the target base. They did work then and it sounds like they still do. Maybe also look at stretching the base to see how far the target audience can move outside of their typical behaviour - let's say 'spend limits' or 'interest range'.